LADY FROGMORE was called to her husband before she had any answer to her question from little Mar. She had asked it with great kindness, with the sweetness of manner which Mary always had with children from the time of her early experiences in the parish with the sturdy little Yorkshire babies—but she had not, to tell the truth, been very deeply interested in the reply. Duke’s little playmate had a certain interest because of Duke, that enormously grown, curiously developed boy, but otherwise—“Good-bye, just now, my little man,” she said, kissing her hand to him. “Lord Frogmore wants me. I shall hear all about it when I come back.” Little Mar crept to the knee of Agnes Hill when Mary went away. He clung to her with a close childish pressure, rubbing his little head against her shoulder. “Why does she call papa Lord Frogmore?” the boy said.
“I don’t know, my dear. She has been gone a long time from home—and there are some things that she has forgotten.”
“Who is the lady, Aunt Agnes?”
“Oh, Mar!” cried Agnes, with a tone of reproach.
“I know,” said the little boy. “You told me—but even grown up people, old people, make mistakes, don’t they, sometimes? It must be—a mistake.”
Agnes shook her head; but she could not find a word to say. Her heart was like a stone within her. Had such a thing ever been heard of as that a mother should forget her only child!
But Mary’s heart was not heavy. She went away lightly through the long corridor to the old lord’s room, and entered it like a sunbeam, smiling on every one. Mary had been a woman easily cast down in her old natural life, an anxious woman, a little apt to take a despondent view. But she was so far from being despondent now that she scarcely showed gravity enough for a sick room. She went in and took her place by the sick bed where her old husband lay, shrunken and worn out, with fever in his eyes, and a painful cough that tore him in two.
“I think,” she said, “that already you are looking a great deal better, Frogmore.”
“I am afraid the doctors don’t think me better,” said the old lord, “and to be prepared in case of anything that may happen I want to have a very serious talk with you, my dear.”
“Nay, Frogmore,” she said, with a beaming smile, “not so very serious. The chief thing is to keep up your spirits. I know by experience that it is half the battle. We shall have plenty of time for serious talks.”
“Well, my love, I am willing to hope so,” said Lord Frogmore, with a faint smile. “But it can do us no harm to make sure. There are a few things I am very anxious to talk over with you. I shall be very sorry to leave you alone, my poor Mary, especially now when there are such good hopes. Our life together has not been so cloudless as I had hoped, but you have made me very happy all the same, my dear love. You must never forget that.”
“Dear Frogmore,” said Mary in a slightly injured tone. “I cannot imagine what you mean when you say our life has not been cloudless. It sounds as if you were disappointed in me—for to me it has been like one long summer day!”
“My poor dear—my poor dear!” he said, feebly caressing the hand that held his own.
“Not your poor dear! I have been a happy woman—far more happy than I could ever have looked for—but I mean to continue to be so,” she added with a little nod of her head which was almost coquettish. “I haven’t the least intention of talking of it as if it were in the past.”
Behind Lady Frogmore in the distance of the large room was someone who looked little more than a shadow, but who took a step forward when the conversation came to this point, and made a warning gesture to the old lord over his wife’s head. Lord Frogmore replied with an impatient twitch of his eyebrows and resumed:
“I don’t want to vex you, my love—but life’s very uncertain for the best of us. It’s hard to tell what a day is to bring forth. I never thought this morning that I should be so happy as to have you with me, Mary, to-night.”
“No,” she said, “how wrong it was of them not to tell me; of course, the moment I was told I came away at once. But you must have known that I would come as soon as I knew that you wanted me, Frogmore.”
“Yes,” he said, with his kind, indulgent smile. “I ought to have known that. At all events, my dear, here you are at last.”
“At last! he talks,” said Mary with a laugh, as if appealing to some one, “as if I had been years away.”
The poor old lord patted her hand with his feverish fingers. There was something piteous in the contrast between his serious anxiety and the light-hearted confidence in her tone. “Well,” he said after a time, “my love—to return to what we were saying. I needn’t tell you, Mary, the chief subject I am concerned about—the bringing up of little Mar. You can’t think,” he said after a pause with a little fervor, “what that baby has been to me while you’ve been away.”
“What baby?” she said, almost with a look of offence, drawing away her hand. “I am surprised, Frogmore, that you should want anyone to take my place for—such a short time.”
“To take your place?” he said, “oh, no; but to wait for you along with me: for to whom else could it be of so much importance, next to me—and who could comfort me like him, Mary! You must be strong now for Mar’s sake.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Frogmore,” she said, her color changing. “It is impossible to me to make out what you mean. You seem to speak in riddles. I don’t know who this child is you have taken such a fancy to. But you mustn’t expect me to follow you in that. I will do anything for your sake, dear, but to give myself up to a strange child whom I know nothing about——”
“Whom you know nothing about! Oh, Mary, my poor Mary,” he cried.
“Whom I know nothing at all about,” she said with some vehemence. “The one I suppose that comes in to play with Duke. Frogmore, I hope you have not given Duke’s place in your heart to any stranger. Oh, I say nothing against the boy!”
“To a stranger!” cried the old man, with a piercing tone of pain.
“Oh, my dear Frogmore, oh, my dear! I would not for the world cross you, and if it is a little favorite—of course I shall take care of him, and love him—try to love him—for your sake: but you must not care for him too much on the other hand,” she said, playfully, though with an effort, lifting up her finger—“to interfere with me—or Duke.”
The old gentleman looked at her with eyes full of pain—“Oh, my poor Mary,” he said, “can you not remember—try and remember—what happened before you went away.”
“I remember very well, my dear,” she said, “only it is strange that you should talk of my going away as if it had been something of the greatest importance. To hear you speak one would think I had deserted you—run away from you—left you alone for years.”
“Dr. Marsden,” said Lord Frogmore. He repeated the call impatiently in another minute, “Dr. Marsden!”
“Do you want to speak to Dr. Marsden? I am sure he will be here directly. Oh, here he is,” said Mary, looking round with a little surprise. “He must have been quite close by.”
“Dr. Marsden,” cried Frogmore, with a gasp for breath, “is this how it is always to be?”
“Oh, I hope not,” said Dr. Marsden. “Things will arise naturally to awaken old recollections; but we must not force anything—we must not force anything. In that case we should only lose what we have gained.”
“But I have no time to wait,” cried the old lord—“I—have no time to wait——”
As he spoke he was seized with one of the dreadful fits of coughing which shook his old frame. There is nothing more dreadful than to look on at one of those accés which threaten to shake the very life out of a worn and exhausted body, and to feel how utterly helpless we are, how incapable of doing anything to relieve or succor. Mary, though she was so placid and confident, so sure that all would be well, was greatly troubled by this attack. She had always been thought a good nurse, but for a good nurse in the uninstructed sense, there is nothing so difficult, nothing so dreadful as to do nothing. She hurried to put her arm under the pillows to raise up the sufferer, to support him in her arms, and was altogether cast down when her trusted doctor put his hand upon her shoulder and drew her away.
“But something must be done—his head must be raised—he must be supported——”
“My dear lady, he must be left alone—you only disturb him,” the doctor said.
She withdrew to a little distance and cast herself down in a chair, and covered her face, but it was not enough not to see, for she could still hear the spasm that shook his old frame. He must be left alone—you only disturb him—— What terrible words are those to say! Was it, she wondered in her confused brain, because of the delusion in his that she had abandoned him? How could he think she had abandoned him? His head must have gone wrong, to think of her short visit to the Marsdens as if it had been a desertion. And this little boy who had been a comfort to him——! Mary could not understand it. The heart which had been so light to come home, so sure that as soon as she was there to take care of him Frogmore would get well, began to sink: you only disturb him! Oh, was it possible that this was the sole issue of her nursing, she who had always been considered the best of nurses! Mary began to cry silently, under cover of the hands in which she had hidden her face, and despair stole into her heart. The sound of the coughing filled the room, persistently, going on and on. Now and then came a break and she thought it was over, but it only began again. And the doctor stood there, only looking on, doing nothing, and Rogers, who somehow stepped out of the shadow behind in anxious attendance too, was doing nothing. So many of them, with the command of everything that money could buy, and yet they could do nothing. The poorest tramp on the wayside could not have coughed more incessantly or with less help from anything that could be done for him than Lord Frogmore.
After this the evening seemed to speed away in an incoherent troubled blank, as it does when illness is present absorbing every interest. It seemed to be ten o’clock, then midnight, before any one was aware that the day was ended; and yet every minute was so long. Mary sat a little apart, with a strange pained sensation of reluctance to subject herself again to that reproach—You disturb him—which rankled in her mind, and vaguely, dimly, saw many things pass which she did not understand. The little boy, for instance, was brought in and flung himself upon Frogmore’s bedside, the old lord turning his worn face to him, stroking the little pale cheeks with his trembling withered hands, and kissing the child again and again. “Oh father,” the child said, “father!” and Frogmore murmured, “my little boy, my little man!” in his feeble voice, again and again. Mary sat bolt upright and looked on, with I cannot tell what wonder and wretchedness in her eyes. She was put away from her husband’s side, and this little thing had his tenderest words. Where had he come home from, that little boy? and by what strange chance had he thus become the sweetest and dearest thing to Frogmore? Sometime in the middle of that long feverish blank which was the night Dr. Marsden came to her and insisted she should go to bed. “He is a little quieter now, and there is nothing to be done. Nothing. Nothing that you or anyone can do. You promised to do whatever I told you when I said I would bring you home, Lady Frogmore.”
Mary made no answer to this voice which came to her in the long silence, and which she was not very sure was anything but a voice in a dream. She looked up into the face of her doctor with a dumb obstinacy which he did not attempt to overcome. For her only answer she crept back to the bedside and took her place again there, and watched and watched till a cold blue stole through the closed curtains and every crevice, and the candles and lamp seemed to grow sick and pale, and it was day again. Frogmore’s face looked grey like the daylight when that pitiless, all pervading light came in; but his eyes turned to her with wistful affection, and he put out his old, withered, aged hand. And then the light faded away.
When Lord Frogmore died his wife behaved like a woman whose sanity was completely restored. The mad doctor, who had proved himself both wise and kind in his unexpected attendance at this deathbed, watched her with the most anxious care, but with great relief. She understood the blow that had fallen upon her, and her grief was great and natural, but self-controlled. She burst forth into no ravings, nor did she show any want of comprehension. She allowed herself to be taken away when all was over, and yielded to the directions of her physician with the old gentle docility. After an hour or two of quiet weeping she fell asleep with her hand in her sister’s hand—a gentle woman stricken with deep loss, but very patient, giving no trouble, just what Mary would have been in other circumstances. Agnes Hill sat by her for hours, feeling as if in a sanctuary, while she listened to her sister’s calm breathing and saw the soft tears steal from under her eyelids—a sanctuary of peaceful sorrow, of patience, not rebellious, not excessive, least of all mad. Agnes sat and cried with an ache in her breast which Mary did not know. The boy! What was to happen to the boy? When Mary woke again, when she came out again into ordinary life, and if the amendment continued and her sanity was recognized, could it be that she would still ignore the boy?